While all the above are unarguable, what I was trying to get at are the things that people take for granted about contemporary life that weren't invented in the last 15 years of profound technological change. Every time I turn on the radio at the moment I hear people talking about the 70s. This seems to boil down to a discussion of features of the decade such as flared trousers, punk rock and the three-day week. What I mainly remember about that decade is how little people had. In that sense the absences are more telling than anything.

If you haven't yet - Howard Sounes Seventies is worth adding to your Amazon basket, for it's overview of the decade (Martin Scorsese, John Updike, Diane Arbus, the Twin Towers) and reclaiming those years from the Abba, disco, spacehopper brigade

Perfect football pitches. Modern players wouldn't walk their dogs on some of the surfaces that top class football was played on in the '70s.Don't mean that as a criticism of modern players, just an observation that pitches in the old days could range from bone-dry dust bowls to gloopy quagmires (the Baseball Ground springs to mind).